According to US Geological Survey data, Turkey was hit by a second earthquake with a magnitude greater than 7.
The 7.5 magnitude tremor was detected about four kilometers outside Ekinozu, Turkey. The European Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) assigned a magnitude of 7.7 to the quake, which struck about 40 miles north-northeast of Kahramanmaras at a depth of 2 kilometers.
It comes after an earthquake killed over 1,300 people in Gaziantep, southeast Turkey (about 100 miles south of Ekinozu), as well as neighboring Syria.
Thousands more were injured when the earthquake struck, collapsing apartment buildings and adding to the devastation in Syria’s already devastated cities.
The earthquake, which struck in the early hours of a winter morning, was the worst to strike Turkey this century. It was felt in Cyprus and Lebanon as well.
Rescue workers working in harsh winter conditions extracted casualties from rubble across the region.
“We were shaken like a cradle. There were nine of us at home. Two sons of mine are still in the rubble, I’m waiting for them,” said a woman with a broken arm and injuries to her face, speaking in an ambulance near the wreckage of a seven-storey block where she had lived in Diyarbakir in southeast Turkey.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said 912 people were killed, 5,383 injured, and 2,818 buildings had collapsed.
Erdogan said he could not predict how much the death toll would rise as search and rescue efforts continued.
In Syria, which has already been devastated by more than 11 years of civil war, the health ministry reported that more than 326 people had been killed and 1,042 had been injured. Rescuers reported 147 deaths in Syria’s rebel-held northwest.
